OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
This is going another direction, I suppose, but I also find Hitler an odd choice if your goal is to rehabilitate far-right authoritarianism in a general sense, and if you're not interested specifically in Jews or Germany. There would also seem to be plenty of great examples from the same period - you could always idealise Mussolini or perhaps Dollfuss, but if they're too much of failures for you, there's still Franco or Salazar. If you allow yourself to include thinkers, there are plenty of far-right writers and thinkers in the 20s and 30s who don't have Hitler's baggage.
I recall once knowing someone who identified openly as 'a fascist', but immediately qualified that to explain that she's anti-Hitlerite, and is instead more along Dollfuss' lines, and took heavy inspiration from José Antonio Primo de Rivera. It's possible to adopt a fascist-ish position along those lines, while resolutely condemning anti-semitism.
The problem, I suppose, is that that doesn't get you attention. The moment you say the F-word you are associated with Hitler whether you like it or not, and if you don't say it, well, you're just some weirdo enthusiast for a bunch of obscure thinkers no one's ever heard of. It's optimising for being unique and special in the vast terrain of weird internet politics nerds, rather than for appealing to real people or building any kind of movement.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Well, I suspect that a Germany that went communist in the 20s or 30s would also end up on the losing side of a world war. A communist Germany, it seems to me, would be likely to feud with Russia over who the de facto leader of European communism is. The Soviets were very invested in that, and they would rather a foreign communist movement fail than turn into a rival to them - as with Spain, for instance, where they prioritised defeating left-wing rivals over defeating the Nationalists. Communist Germany likely either gets absorbed into the Soviet sphere, or it has to fight to prevent it. That's either an earlier GDR, or it's a world war. Neither outcome seems particularly rosy for Germany.
Is either worse than our WWII? I really don't know. It's very difficult to speculate about counterfactuals, especially in a case like WWII where we might have to weigh up competing moral intuitions. Suppose OTL-WWII is on average better for all Germans, but far, far worse for German Jews, whereas AU-communist-Germany is on average worse for all Germans, but German Jews are only a little bit worse than average. A strict calculation of utility favours OTL-WWII, but it's also singled out a small minority for especial suffering. How do you weight that in your calculation? Does it matter? Does it not? I know that to me it feels rather icky to say that I'd prefer the timeline which is slightly better for everyone but which requires throwing a minority group that I'm not in under the bus.
(Maybe it makes a difference that in this alternate history, we, in addition to not having a Holocaust, also probably don't have Israel either. From a Jewish perspective, is it better or worse to never found the state of Israel? Another question that depends a lot on your values.)
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Yes, you don't have to deny the Holocaust to assert that communism was worse than fascism. They - or at least, the Nazi and Leninist/Stalinist incarnations thereof - were both unquestionably genocidal, and killed millions of innocents.
That's the one about a detective uncovering the Holocaust?
One of the questions I would have about that scenario is whether the Holocaust happens at all. The Nazis began it on a large scale only after 1942, and they were aware that the Western Allies would be opposed - that was why they hid it, and why Himmler, purely out of self-preservation, tried to reverse course when it was obvious the war was lost. If Germany is allied with the Western powers, potentially receiving Lend-Lease style aid against the Russians, and is interested in maintaining good relations with the Allies after the war, there's a chance that they're rational enough to not attempt it.
I don't think the Nazis are that rational, but if we're positing a world where the Nazis are allied with the West, we're already positing Nazis significantly more rational and more restrained than the real ones. After the Battle of France there's no very realistic chance, I think, of the UK and US turning around and becoming pro-German, and Hitler was aggressive by disposition. I don't see Hitler restraining his ambitions, either internationally (re: not attacking or conciliating the West) or domestically (re: not attempting to exterminate the Jews). Right up to the beginning of WWII, Hitler's foreign policy was generally to make aggressive demands, daring his enemies to call his bluff, and they rarely did. The Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, etc., all convinced him that making extreme demands paid off, and he continued with that strategy with Poland, France, and then proactively invading Russia in a way that even the highly paranoid Stalin had not expected that early. So an alternate world in which Hitler doesn't pick all these fights is already changing a fair bit.
Of course, you might think an emphasis on Hitler's character is misplaced relative to structural factors - there's the economic case for the war from The Wages of Destruction. But if we follow that case, one of the primary German concerns is dependence on economic networks dominated by Britain and America (and implicitly the Jewish bankers who run them), which seems like it would discourage Nazi Germany from relying too much on their aid. In that situation I'd expect the German aim to be effectively to scam as much resources from the West as possible, use them to conquer the East, and then turn back against the West again - which perhaps gets us back to the 'Cold War with Nazi Europe' scenario.
However, I think the next complicating factor there is Japan. Japan isn't particularly invested in the European front, and the Japanese are probably going to attack the British and the Americans in the Pacific. So we need to posit a timeline in which the Germans junk their alliance with Japan, or potentially one where the Japanese don't attack the British and Americans. So maybe we need another butterfly? The Japanese win at Khalkhin Gol and settle on Strike North?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I suppose to be fair I've misunderstood you a little - the hypothetical anti-communist here does not have to take the position that Hitler is a maximally effective anti-communist, or even good in any respect.
Reading you again, I think the case would be something like this. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were similarly bad. Stalin was around as bad as Hitler if not more so. In OTL, the liberal West allied with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis. Hypothetically, the liberal West could have allied instead with the Nazis to defeat the Soviets. Given that the Nazis and Soviets were similarly bad, this hypothetical world is not obviously worse than the one we actually live in. Even if the result is a Cold War against Nazi Europe rather than against the greater Eastern bloc, is that actually worse?
I don't think I'm convinced by that argument, but I'm open to hearing it. I think I'd want to delve a lot more into what that alternate history would look like, and I have questions regarding how much the Allies moderate hypothetical-alternate-Germany versus how much alternate-Germany influences the Allies, but it would be a real discussion.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I feel like the widespread availability of other anti-communist icons means that I would still be quite suspicious of someone who claims to admire Hitler on purely anti-communist grounds.
That is, 1) there are countless other figures you could choose, so the choice of Hitler specifically, given all his other baggage, causes me to wonder about the person's motives, 2) Hitler failed to stop the communists and his tenure ended with a self-inflicted bullet wound to his own head while the hammer and sickle flew over the Reichstag; why not hold up a successful anti-communist instead?, and 3) it seems like most of the obvious reasons why someone would hate communism should also incline one to hate Hitler and Nazism. Do you hate tyrannical governments? Eccentric dictators who kill millions of their own people? Totalitarianism, or rule by terror? The over-centralisation of power and destruction of both political and civic liberty? It seems like most of the convictions that would plausibly make you anti-communist, at least in the 21st century, would make you anti-Nazi as well.
So if I met somebody who was vocally sympathising with Hitler on the basis of anti-communism, I think I would still raise an eyebrow, to say the least.
I think the best case scenario for unironc admirers of Hitler, for me, would be the number of colonial or post-colonial leaders outside the West who've been fond of him. The narrative there is fairly straightforward - he was a nationalist leader of a country defeated by the Western powers who embarked on self-strengthening projects. It does not hurt that postcolonial leaders themselves are often dictators and therefore more inclined to judge another dictator positively. Add in that many such leaders either don't know and don't care about Jews at all (e.g. East Asian leaders), or have some level of anti-semitism themselves (e.g. Arab leaders), and that part isn't decisive for them.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I have to admit, I'm struggling to feel a lot of sympathy for Cooper here. When you put out a bowl of honey, you don't really get to complain that flies show up. When you put a bird-feeder in your yard, you don't get to complain when it attracts birds. When you leave your food scraps uncovered, you don't get to complain when raccoons find their way to your bin. Likewise when you make a name for yourself sharing edgy anti-semitic views on the internet, you probably shouldn't complain when you get a following of edgy anti-semites. What did you think was going to happen?
(If anybody is inclined to quibble, I am taking Holocaust denial and sympathy for Hitler or the NSDAP as reasonable public signals of anti-semitism - that is, as views that a person would be vanishingly unlikely to voice for non-anti-semitic reasons. Even if you think that Cooper specifically is a disinterested truth-seeker who for some reason is inclined to doubt the reality of extremely well-attested historical events, there's no denying that what is communicated by the views he has shared is sympathy for anti-semitism.)
What should I do here other than point and laugh? Fuentes and the Groypers are ridiculous parodies of human beings. BAP and his crowd are also ridiculous parodies of human beings. Cooper attracted them. Well then. Let them fight.
Because Hinduism is a branch of Indo-European religion that is directly genealogically related to European paganism.
Shinto is not.
I'm not saying anything about 'human capital' or 'peasants'. I'm talking specifically about religion. I think a hypothetical mature European paganism would look more like Hinduism than like Shinto, i.e. it would be a kind of inter-related family of religious movements or cults, vaguely united by a shared (but not uncontested) corpus of sacred texts (European classics compared to the Vedas), but extremely diverse in practice. I could see, for instance, the descendants of Orphics becoming something like Krishna-ism - movements devoted to a specific religious figure interpreted as bringing liberation.
Shinto is not like this at all. Even leaving aside the part where Shinto is not part of the Indo-European family tree at all, Shinto is more like indigenous central and northeast Asian animistic or shamanic traditions. Moreover, modern Shinto is not like that either, because 'Shinto' as a unified construct comes from the late 19th century as a vehicle for Japanese nationalism - the idea of a unified national faith was confected for patriotic purposes, and even today you can find pious Japanese people who consider state Shinto and its descendants to be a perverted mockery of tradition.
But to repeat myself, it is not about liking India in a general sense more than Japan in a general sense. I don't care about that. I am making the specific claim that Hinduism is more like European paganism than Shinto, and then that I think a hypothetical surviving European paganism would look more like modern Hinduism than it looks like modern Shinto. I am not saying that hypothetical-modern-pagan-Europe would look like modern India in other respects.
EDIT: Oh, I should add that it's simply untrue that Christianity never had any significant effect on Japan. It's true that the number of Japanese people who identify as Christian is extremely low, but as we see in the West and as Tom Holland reminds us, the influence of Christianity goes far beyond people who consciously see themselves as Christians. We don't even need to get into the early missions in the 16th and 17th century - the nationalisation of Shinto was a part of Westernisation, and the need for some kind of 'state church' comparable to those in Western countries. Christian converts played outsized roles in Japan's modernisation. Christianity has absolutely influenced the way the Japanese think about religion even today.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Firstly, because nothing actually lasts forever, so I think that where there's a burden of proof, it's on people asserting that nothing can possibly change.
Secondly, because the only way to effectuate change is to first believe that it is possible. So it is usually for the best to operate on the assumption that positive change is possible.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
So I understand "they defected so we have to defect". That's what you have to do if you're stuck in a Prisoner's Dilemma with a repeat defector.
But the question then is - how do we get out of this mutual defection spiral?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Surely the only way to increase the enforcement of the rule of law is to... increase the enforcement of the rule of law? I very much understand and support advocating for the full rule of law in all spheres of life, but if you want to do that, you should, well, do that. Which would include advocating for it here. It's not hard.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
The most distinctive feature of the European mind is not its rationality or objectivity, but its ornery disagreeableness; its inability to be one with itself. Did you think it was a coincidence that both Socrates and Jesus* were sent to the gallows? Confucius and the Buddha were never crucified; Muhammad was revered in his lifetime as a great conqueror of many lands. But the Western sages, the archetypes of the Western soul, were given only death for their troubles; the Western sage is misfit and master rolled into one, hero and scoundrel, insider and outsider (and, going even further, God as an infinite divine being and God as a man who dies a criminal's death); a contradiction that is seemingly in no way "rational". This is why romanticism, Marxism, postmodernism, and in general all "revolts against reason" are not external enemies that threaten the Western tradition from without, but are instead immanent necessities of the Western tradition itself.
I think there is an interesting observation here about historical memory, but I'm wary of cherry-picking examples. I could just as easily, for instance, point out that both Herodotus and Thucydides were respected in their own lifetimes and there is no evidence that either of them suffered a violent death, whereas Sima Qian, the Chinese father of history, was castrated and lived in shame before finishing his works. If I wanted to pick examples of Western sages who were respected and Chinese sages who were hated, I'm sure I could make decent lists.
So I'd want to nuance this observation a bit to make it more about the way figures are remembered - and there it might just be as simple as Christianity. The prophet crying in the wilderness is an archetypal figure in Christian tradition, as is, of course, the misunderstood and persecuted saviour.
Speaking of Christianity...
(*Strictly speaking, Christianity is non-Western in its origins, but it could not have achieved the status it did in European society if it did not possess a certain fundamental comportment with European sensibility. In some ways it is even more "Western" than the varieties of homegrown Western paganism, because it was only through Christianity that the West became itself.)
I'd argue that any definition of 'Western' that excludes Christianity is a failure. 'Western' is basically isomorphic with 'Christendom'; certainly with Latin or Western Christendom, with Greek or Eastern Christendom (also including the Slavic world) being a trifle more ambiguous. But in a broad sense, Christianity is Western because Christianity is what created the West. I believe Hilaire Belloc argued, "The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith." (He is a Catholic chauvinist and discounts other Christians, but the thesis survives, I think, if you broaden it a little.)
If people are inclined to wonder about a hypothetical non-Christian Europe, the model I usually give for that is India. Hinduism is the largest surviving branch of the tree from which European paganism springs. What would Europe be like if Christianity (or monotheism more generally) had never spread? My guess is something like India. Not identical, of course, but I think it is the closest extant model.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
It absolutely is, and the response to it has left me feeling rather ambivalent and frustrated.
I oppose any kind of intervention like this. At the same time, I have been listening to voices on the left, even outside the US, objecting that this is like Russia, autocratic, despotic, McCarthyite, the government imposing an ideology, unconstitutional, violating the very principles of the American experiment, and so on.
And all I can think is - boy, I'm sure glad that the American government wasn't making ideological demands of universities in the name of diversity before this. Can you imagine how horrifying that would have been? Lucky nothing like that has ever happened before!
What the Trump administration is doing is bad, and pretty indefensible. However, it is only a fraction of what his opponents have been shamelessly doing for decades. 'Viewpoint diversity', while a good ideal in the abstract, cannot be imposed like this without horribly undermining the very purpose of a university as an educational and research institution. But the exact same things are true of racial diversity, gender diversity, and so on. May we at least hope that this will cause people to react against the entire notion of imposed diversity requirements?
Well, we may hope anything. But I doubt anything will happen. No one of significance is going to notice the hypocrisy. The right will keep on saying "it's okay for us to do it because they did it first", and the left will keep on saying "this is nothing like what we did how dare you even compare them", and principles will remain alien to this entire discourse.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I'm an FFXIV player. I only get my geopolitical analysis from horny anime girls and gay bunny boys.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I don't watch WoW streamers, so I'm afraid I don't follow.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
What did Motte users win?
OliveTapenade
11d ago
We, kemo sabe?
I'm pretty sure the Motte's rules prohibit coalition-building like that. There isn't a "we" like that, and this is not a forum to strategise for a particular cause.
I also feel obligated to note that there is no 'winning' democracy beyond the short-term. That's intentionally not how it works. One group wins an election, gets a short window, and then have to justify themselves and fight the same battle again, and again, over and over. There is no final or lasting victory.
Now, that aside...
I have noticed the usual panic about fleeing the country. To be fair there were (smaller) panics like that in 2020, in 2016, in 2012, and in every US election in my lifetime. That said, there are more this time around. The other day I ran into someone sharing this and it's obviously quite comical. The Trump administration does a tiny amount of deportation theatre and too-online people predictably panic. I am not saying that any of the administration's deportations have been right - that one university protester idiot should not be deported, despite his idiocy - but I am saying that in terms of realistic threat assessment, this is lunacy. I do not think there is any benefit in indulging it, or treating it as anything other than theatrical flourish from people whom we know are not going to leave.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I think there is a genuine spiritual vision to 'Moloch' - it's the same one in 'The Goddess of Everything Else' and even to an extent in 'Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones'. It's a vision that sees nature as cruel, ruthless, and arbitrary, and which exalts rather in its replacement by conscious organisation in the interests of consciousness. Or at least, in the interests of intelligence, since I think the rationalists have a very minimal (I would say impoverished) definition of consciousness as such. There was a tagline on an old rationalist blog - was it Ozy's? - that I felt summed up this religion well: "The gradual replacement of the natural with the good".
AI-god naturally fits very well into that vision. It is a constructed super-agent that, unlike the messy products of evolution, might be trusted to align with the vision itself. It is a technological avatar of rationalist values - there's a reason why 'alignment' is such a central word in rationalist AI discourse. It's an elevated means by which reality may conform to our vision, which obliterates resistance or friction to it.
(This should be for another post, but I have thoughts about the importance of resistance or friction in a good life...)
'Samsara', on the other hand, is a one-off joke, though for me I think the deepest joke it tells is actually one on Scott. 'Samsara' to me reads fairly typically of rationalist understanding of Buddhism, which is intensely surface level. I know that it's a joke so I'm not going to jump on it for the world full of people in orange robes reciting clichéd koans, but it reminds me a lot of Daniel Ingram's book, and in that way, why neither Scott nor Ingram have a clue about Buddhism. What I mean is that their approach to Buddhism is fundamentally subtractive - it's about removing millennia of tradition to try to crystallise a single fundamental insight. The premise of 'Samsara' is:
Twenty years ago, a group of San Francisco hippie/yuppie/techie seekers had pared down the ancient techniques to their bare essentials, then optimized hard. A combination of drugs, meditation, and ecstatic dance that could catapult you to enlightenment in the space of a weekend retreat, 100% success rate. Their cult/movement/startup, the Order Of The Golden Lotus, spread like wildfire through California – a state where wildfires spread even faster than usual – and then on to the rest of the world. Soon investment bankers and soccer moms were showing up to book clubs talking about how they had grasped the peace beyond understanding and vanquished their ego-self.
Again, not all the paraphernalia should be taken literally (obviously lotuses and robes and pagodas and things aren't hard-coded into enlightenment), but what it does express is the idea that, if it's possible, you can boil Buddhism down to a single essence which can be mastered by a sufficiently determined or intelligent person pretty quickly. See also: PNSE, and those articles Scott writes about jhanas.
But - the thing is, Buddhism is not in fact like that. You cannot reduce Buddhism to One Weird Trick. (Rakshasas HATE him!) You'd think there might be something to learn from the fact that actual Buddhists have been doing this for thousands of years and might have made some discoveries in all that time. Maybe not all the accretion is cruft. In fact for most practicing Buddhists, even very devout ones, enlightenment is understood to be a project that will take multiple lifetimes. And in fact what enlightenment is may have a bit more to it than they think.
Yes, meditation is something that Buddhists do, and it's important to them, but Buddhism is not just about meditating yourself into a weird insight or into an ecstatic state of mind. One of the insights of Zen is that people get those insights or ecstasies all the time, and by itself it doesn't mean much. Buddhism's substantive metaphysical doctrines go considerably beyond impermanence, its ethical doctrines are extremely rich, and its practices merit some attention as well.
Again, I realise that 'Samsara' is a joke, and as a joke I think it's funny. "What if it were possible to boil Buddhism down to a weekend? This is, of course, ridiculous, but wouldn't it be funny?" Yes, it is. But read in the context of Scott's other writings on Buddhism, I think there is a failure to encounter the tradition beyond the small handful of elements that he and writers like Ingram have picked out as 'core' and fixated on.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I have roughly two thoughts here:
Firstly, I don't think that's a very substantial forecast. Those are very safe predictions largely amounting to "things in 2023 will be much the same as in 2018". The predictions he got correct were that a computer would beat a top player at Starcraft (AlphaStar did that in 2018), that MIRI would still exist in 2023 (not actually about AI), and about the 'subjective feelings' around AI risk (still not actually about AI). These are pretty weak tea. Would you rate him as correct or incorrect on self-driving cars? I believe there have been a couple of experimental schemes in very limited areas, but none that have been very successful. I would take his prediction to imply coverage of an entire city and for the cars to be useable by ordinary people not specially interested in tech.
Secondly, I feel like predictions like that are a kind of motte and bailey? Predicting that language models will get better over the next few years is a pretty easy call. "Technology will continue to incrementally improve" is a safe bet. However, that's not really the controversial issue. AI risk or AI safety has been heavily singularitarian in its outlook - we're talking about MIRI, née the Singularity Institute, aren't we? AGI, superintelligence, the intelligence explosion, and so on. It's a big leap from the claim that existing technologies will get better to, as Arjin put it, AGI "achieving total control of humanity's minds and souls".
Being right about autonomous driving technology gradually improving or text predictors getting a bit faster doesn't seem like it translates to reliability in forecasting AI-god.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
It's strange, from the outside - even going back to their beginnings in the early 2010s, AI nonsense, and in general speculative technology, always seemed like one of Less Wrong's weakest points. It was that community at its least plausible, its least credible, and most moonbatty. Where people like Scott Alexander were most interesting and credible was in other fields - psychiatry in particular for him, as well as a lot of writing about society and politics.
So for that whole crowd to double down on their worst issue feels mostly just disappointing. Really, this is what you decided to invest in?
OliveTapenade
18d ago
I'm inclined to agree here - Psmith goes off more in his own direction, but I think Douthat's work is somewhat problematic from the perspective of Christianity itself, and I would presume from the perspective of most great 'religions'.
Probably the most valuable advice Douthat gives is that interested, open-minded seekers ought to genuinely consider the great world religions and immerse themselves in those traditions - the centuries or millennia of practice and meditation and speculation that they hold are not to be dismissed.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
I don't think this does a great job of relaying Douthat's thesis specifically, but I will say that it was delightful to read the second half, where he gives a fresh glance at the gospels.
One of the first pieces of advice I give to anybody interested in Christianity is to sit down and read a gospel, in one sitting. If possible, find a printing of the gospel without section headings or verse numbers, because those just confuse and aren't authentic to the original text anyway. Then read it. Hold all your questions until the end - jot them down if you like, but keep reading. Get through the whole thing in one sitting. And then see how it affects you.
Unfortunately even for churchgoers, one of the most frequent ways to experience the Bible is to hear it chopped up into tiny morsels, and then for each morsel to be surrounded by so much sugar and honey, in the forms of prayers and sermons and hymns, as to make them palatable. But how much scripture can you really get that way? Put all the extras aside, and have a full course meal of nothing but scripture.
Often, I find, when people do this they are shocked by what they find. Perhaps the story is much more dramatic than they thought, or it's much more bizarre and incomprehensible, or they find themselves drawn to or repulsed by characters they never thought about before, or they just realise that the puzzle pieces fit together in a way that they had never registered. But it usually does something, and that something, whatever it is, is worth exploring.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
It frustrated me a great deal because ME1 goes to some effort to show us the disaster of the genophage for the krogan through Wrex's eyes - we see what the effects of this were through a sympathetic, beloved character. Then ME2 shows us the other side of the story - we see the case for the genophage through the eyes of another sympathetic, beloved character. Mordin is obviously very humane and cherishes life, and argues for the necessity of the genophage out of what seems like genuine concern for the krogan. Without the genophage, the krogan would either overrun everyone else, or provoke such a brutal reaction that they would be exterminated.
That seems like it's setting up a confrontation between the two of them in ME3, where the player, after having investigated the genophage deeply in the first two games, now has to make a final call on it - and no matter which call you make, a character you probably like, trust, and want to help is going to feel profoundly betrayed. That's excellent.
But BioWare cop out at the last minute, Mordin changes sides, and oops, his old position is now evil. It's lazy and undermines all their previous work.
Tali and Legion are the same issue - two brilliantly sympathetic, beloved characters, each serving as the face of one side of a genuinely challenging conflict, and once again BioWare swerve at the last minute. I find ME3's writing pretty cowardly.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
I'm not in the business of awarding 'points', whatever that's supposed to mean.
I presume that in this case Hanania is making an argument about populism that he believes is both true and useful. It seems far more productive, to me, to either accept or critique that argument. Who cares what imaginary score he may or may not have? The only thing I can reasonably ask of a pundit is that they attempt, to the best of their ability, to say things that are true, useful, or insightful. As far as I can tell Hanania is doing that. What else ought he do?
Let me rephrase. Let's consider the possible options here, for someone who is genuinely fascinated by fascist thinkers from the 20s and 30s:
You don't call yourself a fascist. Either: 1) people identify you as a fascist anyway, into the ghetto you go, or 2) people don't identify you as a fascist but you're an obscure weirdo interested in irrelevant niche thinkers from a hundred years ago and get zero attention.
You do call yourself a fascist. Either: 1) people immediately associate you with Hitler and you lose all credibility, or 2) your pseudointellectual protestations of not being that kind of fascist lead to endless obscure hair-splitting that stand in the way of any wide appeal.
The problem is that there is no way forward for this kind of movement. The Hitler/Nazi/fascist brand is completely tainted. It does not work, and no amount of hair-splitting about different kinds of fascism or fascist-adjacent politics suffices to defend you.
The people closest to that space who are most successful - think Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and AfD - have gotten there by vocally distancing themselves from any fascist associations and condemning them. Jean-Marie Le Pen was unelectable; Marine broke up his coalition and condemned his positions and allies. Meloni has distanced herself from and condemned the idea of fascism. If you call yourself fascist, or if you can be credibly accused of fascism, you are stuffed. The most successful nationalist right movements, even the ones that have some genealogical links to fascist movements, have needed to powerfully disassociate themselves from fascism and fascist thinkers.
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